Interesting Work Factors

[Ian G Batten]

>From the NAO report on Connecting for Health:

``All downloaded data is required to be encrypted with a 256k [sic] key. 
Using current technical knowledge and technology, it would take around 100
years to break the encryption without the key''

256k?  What does that mean?  And if it's a mistake for 256 bits, 100 years
to brute force a 256 bit means on average 10^67 operations per second,
which seems implausible (*).

Or have we now got visibility of a GCHQ assessment of computing power to
credit your adversary with :-)

ian

(*) check my bc -l:

l((2^255)/(86400*365.25*100))/l(10)
67.26